June 21, 2017

Why GOP is blocking Trump agenda: He has political debt, not capital

The special elections last night remind us that the void left by Democrat failure is being filled by the unpopular cuckservative wing of the GOP, rather than the Trump movement expanding beyond the initial victory of the White House.

That is not for lack of Trumpian candidates in this year's GOP primary elections -- Gray in Georgia, Pope in South Carolina, and Stewart in Virginia, all of whom could have won their primary if only Trump himself had boosted them on social media and other standard means. Pope and Stewart nearly tied the Establishment candidates without any help from Trump, so his intervention would have been decisive for candidates backing his agenda.

Trump's stumping for Establishment Republicans like Handel and Norman, while remaining silent about Republicans who actually support his agenda, is part of a broader pattern of the President doing the work of the RNC and the GOP Congress rather than the other way around. The leadership of the Party and Congress continues to ignore the will of the American people, and keeps foisting unpopular cuckservative "choices" upon them who are only chosen because the Democrat alternatives are hostile anti-Americans, instead of Republicans who support the populist and nationalist platform that won so historically in November.

The only exception has been on trade deals, where the GOP has decided to cut American workers some slack and dial down economic globalization, in order to win the Rust Belt states that are its only path to the White House. Otherwise, the Trump campaign's signature issues -- on immigration, foreign policy, and populism vs. austerity measures -- have been not only ignored by Congress, but outright counter-acted. They have also refused to back his executive actions, leading to their disappearance over the past several months. Not to mention their ongoing acquiescence with, and often eager stoking of, the witch hunt by the media and Deep State to overturn the results of the election. [1]

We are already halfway through the first year of Trump, and the situation has gone from an insurgency of populists and nationalists against the globalist elites, to their leader becoming more and more of a figurehead for the status quo. What gives?

Earlier posts looked at the need for institutional analysis rather than a naive and myopic focus on individual personalities, the dominant power groups being Wall Street for the Democrats and the Pentagon for the Republicans, and the nature of Trump's leverage in the struggle among the power groups -- namely, the size of his support base that he alone can mobilize.

But rather than Trump threatening to mobilize his support base against his negotiating partners, whether Democrats or Establishment Republicans, he has only used them to advance the goals of the GOP elite against the desires of his own base.

That suggests the negotiating position is even weaker than we thought for our movement -- that Trump is being forced to first work off a political debt before the relationship enters the stage of quid pro quo negotiations between Trump and the Establishment. That is worse than merely arriving in Washington with minimal political capital due to being a first-time outsider -- he arrived with negative capital, and he is being detained in political debtors' prison until his account is at least up to zero.

Looking back on his campaign, from the primary through the general, it's understandable why the party leaders, the Congressmen, and the main power group (Pentagon) are all requiring him to work off a massive debt before they even begin to horse-trade with him. The populist and nationalist insurgency destroyed big chunks of political capital of the party elites, the donors, the think tanks, lobby groups, the conservative media, individual politicians and dynasties, policy platforms, and power group institutions like the Pentagon.

Everything they wanted to do was backwards at best, and corrosive at worst, so it's about damn time we change the way things are done around here. They were "more disappointing" than the Democrats, whose sabotage against America is to be expected. The message: they can either change direction and jump on board the Trump train, or they can go extinct.

With so much damage done to their public brand, and Trump's brand only soaring in value by attacking theirs, he was an existential threat to their electability with the general public. Now that the battlefield has shifted from popular support during an election, to political capital within the corridors of power, the badly damaged GOP is making Trump pay them political blood-money in restitution.

He must help get their style of politicians into office -- elected ones, but more importantly the appointed ones now that he's President. He must also stump for their failed and unpopular policy items -- anti-populist healthcare, tax code revision to enrich the rich, lax immigration enforcement, brinksmanship against Russia, ramped-up arming of Jihadi Arabia, and "toning down the rhetoric" against radical Islamic terrorism and Leftist political violence.

The GOP and the Pentagon believe that as long as it's a popular figure like Trump selling these deeply unpopular policies, the people will buy them and the government will go back to business as usual, after an initial disruption.

But they are wrong: Trump succeeded not on his personality or salesmanship, but on his policy stances. Jeb and the other cuckservative rejects never figured that out, and tried to ape his alpha mannerisms and his in-your-face persona rather than his positions on the issues. Trump voters would have voted for Trump's policies if sold by wimpy awkward Kasich, rather than Kasich's policies if sold by alpha charismatic Trump. Trump's take-no-prisoners attitude was the icing, not the cake.

So one of two reactions will happen: Trump may go along with the "paying off his debt" situation in good faith, or he may decide that the bad-faith backstabbing GOP will never consider his debt paid off, and go back to insurgent once again.

It's impossible to predict where things will be after four years, but so far they are clearly in the "going along" lane. If the GOP, the Pentagon, and the Deep State have convinced him that they will take him and even the entire country down if he tries to go insurgent again, he will stay in that lane. That is only artificially suppressing the pressure building up in this country, making the inevitable explosion all the more devastating when it does happen.

If there's 4-to-8 years of Trump advancing Jeb Bush policies, and 4-to-8 years of the populist Democrats getting their act together, Americans will elect their Salvador Allende in 2024, to be followed by our own coup d'etat that will impose Jeb Bush / Hillary Clinton policies at the barrel of a gun, since they cannot win at the ballot box.

Trump and the Trump movement should not favor this artificial short-term stability that causes a larger blow-up down the line. We need to relieve the pressure now so that the explosion is as contained as it can be. If the GOP, Pentagon, and Deep State cannot be persuaded to de-escalate in the interests of our society, then they must be confronted head-on. Trump might as well turn against the cucks in Congress, since they're not intending to give him anything anyway, and Trump supporters should begin holding marches and protests against the Establishment in order to give the President cover at the popular level.

[1] Aside from trade deals, where there has been actual GOP support for the Trump agenda, the only exception has been reduced illegal border crossings and reduced immigration from the countries listed on the Muslim ban, despite its being blocked by the courts (and the GOP Congress refusing to strip district courts of jurisdiction over national matters like immigration).

These changes reflect only the fear effect that Trump's election has created in the minds of would-be immigrants -- not changes in actual immigration policy, let alone changes advanced by the GOP on behalf of Trump. When/if the immigrants figure out that the GOP is actually blocking the Trump agenda on immigration policy, they will begin to stream back in at much higher rates. That may already be taking shape, as the government is admitting higher numbers of guest workers and refugees and other legal immigrant groups -- the Establishment will simply make them legal rather than illegal immigrants who drive down American wages, drive up American housing prices, and displace and destabilize American culture.

8 comments:

very good. The only thing I might add is that a lot of people don't expect Trump to succeed. he is there to buy time to figure out how to communicate in private get the will , skill and kit together for war .

Since the people most interested in war and skilled in it bandy about destroying the food system for cities , extreme causality counts (100 million or more) you have the foundations for a genocidal war of reduction.

I don't think the numbers are there for this yet but I don't know that and the US is not special or immune to the same nation wrecking pressures everyone else is.

The last time this happened we got the civil war and it was moderated by the fact it was fought by armies in much more robust society and that the generals were essentially part of the same social class

This is not the case as it resembles something more akin to Mao or the collapse of a number of Empires . Such a coup de etat might end up with as Western Rifle Shooters put it "Rwanda X Bosnia" and a number of other smaller nations

My personal assumption is that Trump was just saying the right things as all people who want power do and even if he wasn't he won't be allowed to succeed anyway

The US will continue to collapse internally being the sickest man in the cancer ward till it ends up just not functioning period like the old USSR

I might be wrong though and there is a fair chance that once Trump is certain he won't be impeached or worse and if he believes in what he says , he might act

Basically the long and short of it is that when/if the Happening finally happens the left will be at a clear advantage because despite believing they hold the guns, the police, the military, etc. the right falls into a "and then a miracle happens" trap of passivity while the left has spent a long time building up networks that allow them to move, communicate and organize speedily and efficiently. Likewise that the right fundamentally misunderstands the way left wing organizations (and loose association of left wing groups) works and that it tends to work to their advantage. An example given is the way that the Weather Underground (especially Obama mentor Bill Ayers) were supported by the National Lawyers' Guild until they'd been normalized enough to get cushy jobs in academia, something you would never see happen with right-wing extremists. Choice excerpt from the article:

"The affinity group structure began in Spain: anarchists there organized themselves into small groups of very close friends who knew each other very well, because such small groups were difficult to infiltrate. Even if they were infiltrated, exposing one group wouldn’t blow the whole organization.

The American Left picked up on affinity groups in the late 1960s. They started as a means for organizing protests and turned into a means of organizing movements. To coordinate, they send members back and forth to spokescouncils. The idea is to create a very collaborative discussion. This is partly due to the influence on the modern hard Left by Quaker organizers — if you remember those lengthy Occupy meetings that just went on and on and on, it’s because that’s how decision-making is done in Quaker meetings, and Quaker organizers taught the technique to Lefties in the ’70s anti-nuclear movement. And it spread, because lefties in different movements talk to each other and work together all the time.

By contrast, righty organizations have historically been slow to organize. When they do, right-wing activists tend to stay in their own lanes and not work together, share notes, or reach out to one another’s followers. Think about the mishmash of signs you typically see at a Lefty protest, and then try to remember the last time you saw, say, an RKBA sign at a pro-life rally. More unfortunately, when righties do become active, they tend to do something like start a blog. Or make a YouTube channel. Or write a magazine article. In short, they become street-corner evangelists. They tend not to do things in meatspace."

Pretty sure the Holocaust was right-wing collective political violence, just one generation before the Sixties.

Or see the previous peak of from-below collective violence circa 1920 -- then it was white people burning down black neighborhoods and lynching blacks, not the other way around.

The government destroyed the offices that the Leftists were organizing out of (the Palmer Raids during the real Red Scare), and deported many of their ring-leaders back to Europe (Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, et al).

Today's climate feels more like 1920, before the Great Compression when everybody was supposed to get along with each other and give others the benefit of the doubt. The peak of political violence circa 1970 was part of that Wonder Years climate, and will not get a friendly Ward Cleaver style reception in this much more angry and no-holds-barred climate that we're in now.

Who says that within 10-20 years, we won't see a revival of lynchings and neighborhood burnings like we did during the 1920 peak? Probably targeting immigrants / Muslims, not blacks (who were the newcomers during 1920, leaving the South during the Great Migration into the West and Midwest).

And who says the Germans aren't going to Holocaust the Muslims within the next generation or two? Christ, the last one wasn't even 100 years ago!

Right-wing violence is usually outsourced to the state, which Leftists do not like and do not have a foothold in anyway (in the branches that use armed force, at any rate). All we have to do is howl for a crackdown by the police, National Guard, or the national Army, and the radical Left will get wiped out. If the government refuses to answer our howls, the people will elect those who will answer the howling.

The article is correct about the fast-slow difference -- Leftists being quick, and Rightists being slow-to-anger.

The trouble is that this means the dynamics are those of a fast-slow system with hysteresis, like a neuron firing. The stimulating variable is fast, while the recovery variable is slow. Here, stimulus = Leftist violence (mostly from below), recovery = Rightist violence (mostly from the state).

These systems show trajectories that are like roller-coaster rides -- a soaring level of one variable, then a soaring level of the other after a seemingly long delay to counteract the first variable's rise. The recovery variable remains sky-high until the stimulus variable has been almost totally wiped out. Meaning, state violence will stay high until the whole Left is wiped out, not dialing down the police and Army response proportionally to the number of Leftists they remove.

That leaves a lot more death and destruction, compared to a system where the recovery variable is fast to counter-act the stimulus variable. Like a swift "eye for an eye" response. The slower the response is, the greater the magnitude of the response when it ultimately turns on. And obviously the greater the magnitude of the stimulus variable (harm by Leftist violence) because it's had so much longer to do its thing before being counter-acted.

By outsourcing their violence to the state, Rightists make their response a lot slower than if they just found the Leftists and burned down their buildings and shot the agitators. It would get nipped in the bud.

I was hoping that would be happening with the Trump supporters beating back Antifa, but it's clear that Leftist violence is going to come from so many different places and actors and groups. We're going to have to farm our response out to the police and Army, who are going to do far worse than what the annoyed little guy citizen would be doing.

I'm preparing a full post on this topic -- slow-to-anger vs. swift justice -- but you get the basic idea.

That article doesn't appreciate the nature of a collective response -- they think Rightist militias (or some random angry mob) is going to try to surgically target the Leftists responsible for some act.

That is a response to the individual responsible for some crime -- just vigilante style.

In a collective response, the mob is going to find out that the Leftists live in some neighborhood or housing unit where Leftism is festering -- directly from those setting off bombs etc., and indirectly from their neighbors who condone such activity.

So /pol will figure out where the location is, the mob / militia will show up, and they'll burn down the building or lay waste to the neighborhood. Imagine what kind of store-fronts the Rightists will be confronted with in a Leftist stronghold -- they will feel zero guilt smashing up some vegan coffee house or designer fashion boutique.

If Antifa smashes up McDonald's, will the Rightist militia go smash up their stores where they live? Seems inevitable.

The smug Leftists are conflating two separate variables -- whether justice is meted out by the state or by vigilantes, and whether punishment will target individuals responsible of specific bad acts or target a collective that incorporates and nourishes these bad actors.

Collective punishment does not have to hunt around and develop fine-grained intel about where the specific bad actors are -- just nuke their whole ecosystem.

"agnsotic, National Democratic Workers Socialism has some nationalist/Nordic supremacist elements but is a Left wing ideology to the core."

Opposing mass immigration, Affirmative Discrimination, homosexuality and feminism is left-wing to the core? Discipline in schools, an end to the sociology departments, putting away the criminals for good is left-wing? Some basic welfare may be seen as left-wing, but conservative people have been involved in charity in every age. Kings who gave food to the poor were hardly left-wing. Neither is it left-wing to have some basic rules for work and trade - again, something conservatives have always had. What is left-wing is the Marxist worldview of oppressors vs. oppressed, as an excuse to cater to the lowest, the lazy, the criminals, the freaks, and use them against normal society. That is the opposite of the National Socialists. "Our socialism is not the socialism of the Left." "We will take the word 'socialism' from the socialists." George Orwell: "For all their talk about workers, the fascist movements derive most of their support from the upper classes."